journey beginning

as of this morning i have returned from a grand adventure to europe, where i first went on a road trip with a carful of my high school girlfriends, and then on my first ever trip by myself, on a gran return to copenhagen 7 years post-study abroad. i consider no trip complete until i've irresponsibly lost my neck pillow somewhere on the planet, so, farewell pirrow (the one pa bought me for christmas to replace the one i lost) - i'm back in orlando. i'm going to write about my adventure snippets as they come.

in the week prior to my departure, my last grandparent, my ah-gong in ilan, passed away unexpectedly. though he no longer recognized most people he had known, we expected to have a few more years with him because his physical health was good. the funeral was already set for the 19th, which would be my last night in ireland before flying to denmark. i immediately thought to cancel the trip to attend the funeral, but decided with ma and pa to go on with the adventure and then go back to california in a few weeks to be with the family. it was a difficult decision but i think it was the right one.

because of perpetual geographical distance (america, taiwan) and perpetual language barrier (english, japanese/taiwanese), my grandfather and i were never close in the way that i think other people are with their grandparents. my strongest and warmest memories are of when he would take me out to the harbor when i was little to look at the fishing boats, when we would play mah-jong during chinese new year, and our shared love of his orchids, his stamp collection, and of photographs - family photos in particular. in chinese belief, after death, a person's spirit roams the earth for (7?) days, visiting family members and familiar places. i don't know what i feel about that, but i couldn't stop imagining that my grandpa, for the first time, might finally be seeing my life and understanding my personality and i felt good about what he would see.

on my last visit, feb 2015

 drinking beers

Dry time

I think the main difference between the United States and Taiwan is that in Taiwan your blankets always smell like mold and in the US they do not

sheep year

As we hiked through my ma’s hometown yesterday fresh off the bus and laden with heavy bags full of clothes for ourselves and vitamins to give away, I asked her if coming back to NanFang Ao makes her miss her childhood. She said, ‘不會! (NO!) It’s not such a great place!!!” 

It’s been three years since my last visit. Many things are different. Chinese New Year used to be a grand event - red ribbon and lanterns festooning the streets and traditional cakes and snacks sold in every stand by the road. Every night leading up to the new year you could hear firecrackers going off outside, loud and startling like gunfire being opened again and again. Now it seems you would hardly know that there’s any cause for celebration. I’m told that people are less interested in going home for the holiday and nowadays prefer to go on vacation instead. The biggest change is that my grandpa no longer recognizes me. He asked ma who I was and whether I had ever come here before. She showed him the baby picture of me that hangs in the house and said that I am that baby, and he pointed at the picture and said but this one is small, and pointed at me, and this one is big. He sits in a reverie and then occasionally bubbles up with stories that never happened, like how my aunt is trying to become an OB-GYN but no one will hire her because she is so small, or how there is a bank across the street that has so much money it’s all over the floor and no one knows about it, how his uncles are all alive and well into their 100s, and how he was once hit by a car and left for dead in a cave but a child found him and noticed that his finger was moving and took him to the hospital. 

There is an Indonesian girl in her early 20s who lives in the house. She comes from a very big family with little money and was sent abroad to work and support the family. She’s already worked here for three years as my grandpa’s caretaker and is planning to work here for three more before going home and getting married. This is the first time I’ve met her and she’s extremely sweet, has learned a little bit of Chinese in her time here, and I can’t imagine working as hard as she does. At 6am she is up cleaning the house and the rest of the day she spends every moment by my grandpa’s side, helping him walk, brush his teeth, and eat and sleeping in a bed by his at night. I feel a sense of guilt and estrangement to see someone else taking care of my grandpa while I either watch or am absent.   

There is also a rambunctious lady called A-su who originally comes from the south but married into this area and comes by every day to cook and help take care of the house. Yesterday she took me on a tour around town in her rickety old car that smells like mold and has one of the passenger-side windows held in place with mailing tape. She dropped me off in front of a friend’s store and told me to go in and pick whatever snacks I wanted while she parked the car. I went in and it was a store full of dried and canned fish. She told me about how she once found a very large hermit crab and kept it as a pet and showed me the beach where she would let it take walks once a week. It lived on fruit for about 6 months and then suddenly died. At the harbor she showed me what kind of fishing boat she and her husband used to own, before his health began to decline and he passed away. She says when her son was recently married they slaughtered 15 pigs for the event but that she was too scared to watch and didn’t go over until it was all done. In the evening she came back from checking on her grandson, running up the stairs and declaring it was time for us to drink and set out cans of Taiwan Beer. This morning she took me to pick up chickens from her classmate (I later found out they met in her weekly fortune telling class). Her classmate is an artist who lives in a nearby town and brews drinking vinegar in thousands of large ceramic jugs in the yard and her husband has a few hundred free-range chickens that he raises. The classmate had a headscarf on because, A-su told me, she had a fight with her husband and shaved off all her hair and moved to a monastery for a few months.  

family bus

When I was Skyping my parents tonight, Ma sent me this picture of the bus my uncle just paid half the cost for for their hometown's elementary school, which is at the top of a mountain. The other half of the money was footed by the local temple to Mazu, the goddess of the sea. In the second line of text you can see the name of the temple, then after the backslash the names of my grandparents. 

I'm feeling excited and proud about this bus.

summer flies

For those who asked for asked for summer, it's here. It's hot and it's humid and I like it as long as my air conditioner stays faithful. I can't put a glass of wine down in my room without turning around to find six fruit flies got a swimming pool full of liquor and they dive in it. In the kitchen the big black flies reign supreme and zip around in swarms and perch and rub their hairy little legs on our dishes. I was toweling off in the shower the other day and saw a tiny tiny leech? inching along the shower floor. I was mortified. I washed it down the drain because I didn't know what to do. I googled "tiny leech in my shower" and it turns out that there are flies that grow their young, which look like tiny leeches, in your drains. I continue to feel mortified.

The summer sun stays up late and makes broad daylight past 8 o'clock post meridiem. It's also particularly white bright and blinding. I hear summer in New York explodes with fun things to do, but I guess I haven't heard as much about them because I've been working full time. Last week, though, I did attend a lecture by one of the partners of BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), an impressive architecture firm based out of New York, Copenhagen, and Beijing and the company that designed and built the Danish Pavilion (of which I have fantastic memories) at the Shanghai World Expo three years ago. They're also apparently building a fancy beach resort near my mom's hometown in Taiwan. He talked about the reappropriation of industrial structures for public use and enjoyment and showed a maritime museum, park, and a waste management plant with a ski run on top as examples that were built in Denmark. Yeah, I liked that.

mom in taiwan

pictures my dad took of my mom on their recent trip to taiwan for chinese new year

ting

i'm working with a taiwanese girl on my physical computing midterm. i consider myself taiwanese too. the only difference between us is that i barely speak chinese. when she talks to me, little does she know that i'm typing on my laptop because i'm translating the things she's saying.

princess of supernatural favour

the town my mom comes from is called nan (or south) fangao - 南方澳. there is also a bei (north) fangao. when all the people who lived in bei fangao were moved so that the area could be turned into a military base, the only thing that didn't move was the temple to Mazu, the goddess of the seas and protector of all sailors and fishermen. the people went to the temple and asked her, by using divination blocks, if she wanted to move to bei fangao. the divination blocks, or bwa bwei, are red, crescent-shaped wooden blocks that you throw on the ground. depending on how they land, your question will be answered with a yes or a no. she repeatedly said no, so the temple stayed. when we were looking for a new cook and caretaker for my grandpa's house in yilan, the woman who was interested in the position was taken to the local Mazu temple by a family friend and they used the divination blocks to ask Mazu if she approved of this woman working for our family. apparently the answer was yes.

we have two altars on the third floor of the house in nan fangao, where i spent most of this past week. the one on the left is dedicated to our ancestors and the one on the right is to the gods. i'm not particularly religious, but the questions i asked for new year's were:

(abbreviated)

to the gods: 

is bagel a good man? yes

is graduate school a good idea? no

i can't remember the last one

to the ancestors:

is bagel a good man? yes

is going to graduate school a good idea? no

do you watch over me? yes

People still give birth to babies. There are a few nice parks.

Last night my good friend Fife texted me to ask if I wanted to go see the Ai Weiwei exhibition. I texted back "Sure" and, absentmindedly - "what is it." Ridiculous, because I know well enough who Ai Weiwei is and was very much moved the Newsweek coverage of his supporters folding money into paper airplanes and flying them into his yard to help fight his tax evasion charges. Very luckily, Fife and I were able to catch the "Ai Weiwei, Absent" exhibition on its second-to-last day in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum on my second-to-last day in Taiwan. I was very excited to see things Weiwei'd made. We saw the photographs he took in New York while studying at Parsons and the pieces Grapes, Surveillance Camera, Colored Vases, Chairs, Watermelon, and Forever Bicycles, among others. I saw his Circle of Animals sculpture, which will also be up at LACMA until February 12th, so I'll go visit them again at home. Read his essay The City: Beijing.

I think sentimental personalities skip generations. My ma is a spartan, practical woman who rarely exhibits extreme outward emotions. I cry all the time and have my grandfather's sticky-handed attachment to objects (two days ago he was showing us his seventy-year-old middle school report cards) in addition to a chronically weepy attachment to people. Prior to this week I hadn't seen Fife in well over a year. It was really joyous to see a familiar face from Shanghai again and saying goodbye at the subway station made me feel deeply troubled, end-of-the-world sick and panicked like all hell. This same feeling when: I discovered this week that I have a great-aunt who lives on Long Island. I resolved to meet her when I am in town next month, which led to a long talk from my ma about why that can't really happen, all of it boiling down to how gender inequality and fighting over money and property have rent both the maternal and paternal sides of my family apart and left us all on antagonistic, non-speaking terms.

dragon year

happy chinese new year

 last night i beat the pants off of everyone in mahjong

ma's ma's ma, Hu Jiayu

today i learned that my great grandmother's name was 胡嘉鱼: Beautiful-Fish Hu

wet week ahead

jesus. i'm suddenly glad i impulse bought these

despite living in la

skypee

skyped my pa who is in taiwan, who only gently chided me for neglecting to call him and reassured me that i'm doing all the right things in life and not just being stupid

home hot pot

my ma, moanin' and groanin' all afternoon about how they're carrying fewer taiwanese brands at the chinese supermarket.

dinnertime

pa: why are these noodles so bad

ma, instantly riled: because they're made in CHINA

my pa, talking about how basically no food existing in china is fit for consumption and that all the nice mainland restaurants import their food from taiwan, where there are standards

чёрт поцеловал льва

i sat completely frigid outside today, cold fingers and toes, reading about participles until i felt incompetent. was rejected from a minimumwagejob tonight. have embarked on my second attempt to read the foundation pit. last night i couldn't sleep because i drank two cups of coffee before bed so i wandered the internet and discovered that a registered sex offender used to live in my very apartment. if these walls could talk

took my language proficiency test via landline on monday - accent was identified immediately as of-taiwanese-descent. rather proud of it

that stupid and empty хурма thing

uffie - ADD SUV

one week ago i was hung over in taipei.
seven days later i am hung over in los feliz.

embarking on teaching myself one mandarin lesson a day. saints preserve us

-update-
at tenish pm i was in the kibitz room when i realized the hangover was finally gone and i felt so liberated and so good

danshui

people rarely spoke taiwanese in the big city in the past. it was considered rural, low-class compared to mandarin. but now, it is quite commonplace to hear it in taipei. an expression of national solidarity.

my parents moved us from the center of taipei to a condo next to a mangrove forest. right now going to go swimming in the rain.

driving sleeves

my ma told me in all seriousness the other day that i need to wear long sleeves when i drive so i don't get so tan

i'd rather be the darkest mofo in taiwan come april than wear "driving sleeves"

yuLike

last night during dinner my mom was telling me about how floods were common when she was growing up. if there was a storm, her elementary school, which was on the mountain top, would send all the kids home. parents didn't panic back then the way they do now. the kids would all link arms and climb down and back home to town. they would wade through knee-deep water, surrounded by floating radishes, dead wild pigs, and dead chickens washed down the mountain.

she once had a dream as a young child of an enormous flood flushing the town and a giant carousel descending from the sky and lifting all the children away.